


The past in the future (And Put Away Childish Things remix)

by pamymex3girl



Category: Doctor Who (2005), Torchwood
Genre: Children of Earth Compliant, Future Fic, Gen, Reconciliation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-10
Updated: 2014-05-10
Packaged: 2018-01-24 06:51:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,825
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1595603
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pamymex3girl/pseuds/pamymex3girl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Her father is smiling, except he's from the before, so he's not her father, not yet anyway.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The past in the future (And Put Away Childish Things remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [And Put Away Childish Things](https://archiveofourown.org/works/98299) by [voodoochild](https://archiveofourown.org/users/voodoochild/pseuds/voodoochild). 
  * In response to a prompt by [voodoochild](https://archiveofourown.org/users/voodoochild/pseuds/voodoochild) in the [remixmadness2014](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/remixmadness2014) collection. 



> I'm hoping that you like this, and I did this right. In all honesty I'm not a big fan of Chilren of Earth but there are a lot of great fics about the aftermath. 
> 
> Disclaimer: I don't own aything, everything belongs to it's respectful owners.

_‘To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that that prisoner was you.’_

_Lewis B. Smedes_

*~*

Her father is smiling.

Except that he’s living in the before, and she is living in the after, so he’s not her father and she's not his daughter, not yet anyway. She wonders, briefly, if he would know her anway, if some part of him would tell him that that woman, right there, is his daughter, even if that doesn't make sense. She doesn’t really think so, that really wouldn’t make sense, but still, she wonders. In the end it doesn’t really matter, because someday in his future – and her past – he’ll meet her mother and she’ll be born. It is inevitable, as inevitable, it seems, as the death of her son. So he is her father, he just doesn’t know it yet.

He looks so young.

This is the first, and most important thing really, that she notices about him. Well, she notices it after she’s gotten over the initial shock of actually seeing him and after realizing that this was not the Jack Harkness that killed his grandson, but the one that came before. (The one she never, ever knew, and sometimes that makes her really, really sad, because he looks so happy right now.) This, she thinks, is the Captain of those stories her father used to tell her – the tales that had passed long ago, he used to say, but that still have to come (it didn’t makes sense then, and it still doesn’t really make sense, not to her at least, but then she’s not a time traveler.) But now he stands there, close enough that she could call out to him should she want to, and she realizes for the first time how old her father really was, how tired he was. That knowledge doesn’t change anything, not really, because her son is still dead and her father still did it.

There’s a gun in her bag – she’s been carrying it around for years, to protect herself and because she’sl always believed that she might shoot him on sight. (Although, deep down inside, she’s always known that she won’t do it.)

She could just kill him, right now, there’s nobody stopping her after all. His companions would freak out (because of course he’s not alone) but she could do it, and she’d manage to get away with it. (Because she’d fade away, wouldn’t she, if her father dies in the before?)

But then her eyes rest on the young girl beside him and she realizes, with a jolt, that these people msut be the Doctor and Rose. She’s never met them and she nev er will, she’s never even seen a picture of them, but she knows them by sight nevertheless. (She thinks it’s because of the way her father looks at them.) It’s been a very long time – and she really doesn’t want to think about the past too much, especially not when it involves remembering her father – but her father used to tell her stories about them. He spoke of the man called the Doctor, an alien who owned a time machine, who travelled the universe and spend his time protecting people and saving civilizations. The Doctor was always the hero of her father’s tale, but Alice remembers hearing the story for the first time and thinking that the true hero was her father. But that, that was long, long ago. He also spoke of the younger girl from London, someone who saw the wonders of the universe. And, of course, the Captain, who became a far better man through their example.

She used to love those stories, she did, but that was long, long ago.

Those stories have long since ended, she’s living proof of that.

But they, the past versions of them, are still in the middle of their story – or maybe they’ve already reached their final chapter, maybe their almost disappearing. She could, of course, tell them what is to come but she doesn’t think they’ll believe her and she knows she shouldn’t do it. They’re so happy, Alice thinks, so care-free, and so incredibly young. So unaware, she realizes, of what will happen to them and who they’ll be at the end of their tale. (She could end it all, he would never wake up again, that’s the point, and maybe, she thinks, the world will be better, and maybe it will be worse.)

They are, she thinks, the past in the future.

That which has already been and yet still has to come.

It doesn’t really make sense but her father once said that time travel never truly makes sense when you’re not in it and she shouldn’t think about it too much.

Alice knows how their story ends.

She knows that Rose will fall, that she will live but she’ll disappear from their world, and that the three of them will never be together as they are now. It hurst a little to see them so happy here and to know, without a doubt, that they’ll never be this happy again, at least not together. But then she remembers Steven’s screams and all her pity fades away, like it was never there. At the end of his story – or, considering his immortality, at the end of the chapter of his life that involved her – Jack will stand there in silence as his only grandson dies (so that he could save everyone else, Alice has accepted this, but it doesn’t really change the fact that he actually killed him.) And she knows that no matter what he says, the Doctor, the savior, the supposed protector of the earth, will never come down to help them. That when she and her father needed him most, he’ll never even show his ace. She hates him, almost as much – if not more – than she hates her father, because in the stories he’s always there, doing everything he can to save everyone, even if he does not succeed. (And he probably still doesn’t know who she is nor who Steven is, and maybe he doesn’t really care.)

She wonders whether her father lied to her about the Doctor being a hero, or if it was the Doctor who lied to her father.

She’s not sure how long she stands there – but it can’t have been that long, because surely if it was hours they would have noticed her – but even though she could kill him, she never takes out the gun, never watches him fall to the ground paying for a crime he hasn’t commited yet. (Is it right or wrong, she wonders, to kill him now for something his future self will one day do?)

All she does is stand in the shadows and watch as they – the past in the future – walk off arm-in-arm, smiling, unaware of what the future will bring them and what it will turn them into.

*~*

Sometimes she wonders if she’ll ever see him again.

If one day she’ll just be walking down the street and suddenly he’ll be standing there. She knows he’s there, at least she believes he is, in the shadows, watching over her without ever showing his face. She knows because she’s always safe and when she’s in trouble there’s always some help near. She never acknowledges it because if she were she might have to talk to him again, and she just doesn’t want to do that because she’s not sure what she feels about him and what he did. She’s not sure she’ll ever be ready to speak to him again and she knows he knows that too because he’s never even tried to walk past her house, let alone contact her.

Sometimes she wishes she could see the one from before again.

The young and happy one, running around with the Doctor and Rose, as happy as he could be. She wonders, briefly, what she would do if she ever does see him again.

(Nothing probably.)

It doesn’t matter, it’s not like any of it will ever happen.

*~*

When it all ends he’s suddenly there, standing in the doorway of her hospital room, just like she somehow always knew he would be.

She didn’t call for him, didn’t contact him in any way – definitely not to let him know that she was ill – but she’d still known he would be there, because that was just the way he’s always been. (She suspects that it was Torchwood that contacted him, but she’s not sure if he’s had any contact with them since the death of her son, at least Gwen has never alluded to him once in all the times they spoke.) She can hear him talk to her Doctor, pretending he’s her grandson (oh, the irony) and she closes her eyes in grief and thinks of Steven and all that happened, but she’ s no longer angry. The anger and the hatred faded a long time ago.

He smiles at her when he walks in and he still looks the same as years ago and she realizes, with a pan, that he’ll always look like this. That a thousand years from now he might be sitting at someone else’s deathbed, someone she doesn’t know and someone that probably doesn’t know about her, and he’ll still look like this. (And she remembers how happy he was that one time she saw him when he still lived in the before and it actually hurst to see how different he is now, and she tries to imagine how lonely he’ll be in a thousand years and how much pain he will be living in by then.)

He doesn’t speak as he sits beside her and she wonders then what it is that he sees. Does he see an old woman, fighting a desease at the end of her life, or does he still see his little girl, the one she had once been?

“Dad.”

She struggles to sit, determined to do so, so she can hold his hand better, so that she can speak to him and tell him all the things she hadn’t said before, even though she thinks he already knows.

“Dad, I-I missed you.”

“Missed you too, Allie.”

It’s the first time she’s heard the nickname in decades and it hurts to remember how it was before but she still smiles. He places a soft kiss on her hand and she wonders what this scene looks like to outsiders – because surely he’s not acting as if she’s his grandmother – but she’s to tired to really care about those things.

_I forgive you._

She never says it out loud but she knows he knows anyway. It’s the last thing she ever does.

*~*

_‘Forgiveness is not always easy. At the time, it feels more painful than the wound we suffered, to forgive the one that inflicted it. And yet, there is no peace without forgiveness.’_

_Marianne Williamson_


End file.
